


Explaining

by Why_2k15



Category: We Are Okay - Nina LaCouer
Genre: I don’t know they’re just talking on a beach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-18 00:54:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29481015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Why_2k15/pseuds/Why_2k15
Summary: It’s just Marin Mabel and Ben back on Ocean Beach and Marin explains why she disappeared
Kudos: 1





	Explaining

As many times as I’ve been on this beach, I’ve never expected it to be so comfortable. This sand has always been scratchy, following me home, clogging the drain, sleeping with me at night, making me break out in little red bumps. But I’m here, the salt on my skin again, the breeze whipping my hair around. It’s different from the way a snow storm would. A storm would pull it this way and that, wanting to rip it out from under my hat, snapping it back against my neck. This is no less gentle, but it’s blowing in one direction, keeping the hair out of my eyes. Not that having hair in my eyes would obscure a view. It’s far too dark to see anything anyway, the black of the sky melts into the ocean, into the sea, upto my feet. Everything is this darkness. It feels like the love seat lectures and the noise of poker.  
The sand softly rubs at my feet, and the spray of crashing waves splashes my arms, and they are the only reason I know I’m real. Well the only reason aside from Mabel a few inches to my left and Ben a few to my right. They’re trying to hide it, but I can feel their fear, the glances to each other as if I’m not here. They want to say something, but neither knows how to start speaking. Ben doesn’t know why I disappeared yet. He just knows that I was gone and now I’m back, standing on this beach again for the first time since Mabel first left for school.  
It feels more like home now than it ever had before, when I was just waiting to remember anything. Now I can see my mother coming over the crashing waves, even without seeing the ground. I can feel her hugging me before running into the surf, smell her lavender and sea salt hair, hear her bragging about how I’ll be the best surfer on Ocean Beach one day.  
I sit down. Mabel and Ben follow my lead  
“The beach is too quiet at night,” Mabel says. I think she just needed to say something, but I know what she means. It’s as if the waves are so good a drowning out sound that they themselves have become silent.  
“It’s like a sensory deprivation tank.” These are the first words I’ve heard Ben say in over six months. He’s just as right as Mabel.  
“Yea,” I respond. Just so they know I’m listening.  
Mabel knew that Ben would be home for spring break instead of going off with new friends to party for a week straight. I knew I had explaining to do, he deserved to know just as much as Mabel had when she visited for Christmas. I tried to think of the best way to tell the whole story, and decided it would be easiest on neutral land, when I couldn’t actually see his face. Mabel suggested we sneak out again --meet Ben outside his house and walk to the beach-- like we had last summer.  
“When Gramps died,” I finally start, “I found all of my mom’s stuff in his closet.” I’ve rehearsed this in my head a few times. I know what words come next, but I’m choking on them. Only Mabel, Ana and Javier have heard this directly from me. “He hadn’t gotten rid of anything, all her pictures and clothes. Everything. And he never shared it with me.” I can remember her now, but I still mourn the years I couldn’t. Mabel’s hand is in mine now. It shouldn’t be this hard, but she can tell I’m struggling.  
I don’t know if Ben has reacted, I’m too busy focusing on the Gramps I loved, and who loved me back. I don’t want to remember him any other way.  
“He chose not to let me remember my mother. And his letters. Birdie wasn’t some lonely old woman living in the midwest, she was my mom. He wrote all the letters, the ones he sent and the ones he received.” I guess it was the only way he could cope with losing her. “I didn’t want to believe he was gone, or go back into that house, or accept that he had been lying. So I ran.” Mabel’s hand in mine is grounding more than the sand, I’m holding tight, waiting for Ben to say something.  
Ben fumbles in the sand until his hand is holding mine, “I’m glad you’re home.”  
We sit in silence for a while longer, until the sky begins to exist outside of blackness again. I ask Ben how school’s been. He tells us about his favorite class, his most annoying professor, his best roommate. We fall into the rhythm we used to have, Mabel too, and then the sun is rising. It’s a new day, a new dawn, with the same friends, on the same beach. And we may not be the oblivious, innocent seniors we used to be but this is better.


End file.
